We are finally there. Although former Prime Minister Yves Leterme assumed that the split-up of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) would have taken only five minutes of political courage, in fact it took the politicians several years to reach an agreement. The Butterfly agreement of 11 October 2011 on the sixth state reform has solved the problem, or better said, resulted in a compromise à la belge.

The electoral district BHV dates back to 1830, shortly after the independence of Belgium. After the first state reforms, which divided Belgium into monolingual communities and territorially based regions, a special phenomenon occurred: the electoral district BHV spanned two regions (and two linguistic areas), namely the Flemish Region and the bilingual Brussels Capital Region. It included the 19 municipalities of the bilingual area Brussels and 35 municipalities of the province Flemish Brabant. Moreover, the federal Election Act was changed in 2002 and merged the former electoral constituencies based on communal districts into provincial electoral districts. Nevertheless, in Flemish Brabant, the existing districts BHV and Leuven remained unchanged.

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